@nooneinparticular Said
I made no judgement on which is better or preferable and I made no comment on positive or negative conditioning. Be that as it may, lets go down this rabbit hole a bit. How would you use positive reinforcement to change the behavior of 'the girl who refuses to learn'? The key to positive reinforcement is that the person in question must act positively in some way in order to receive a reinforcer. What do you do if the girl doesn't act positively to justify a reinforcer?
You absolutely have made those judgements and comments.
You're arguing that if someone makes a public statement that others perceive as racist, before determining if that person even realizes he has offended someone, and even if he is completely innocent of intentionally causing offense, the only appropriate thing to do is for others to publicly shame him.
This is exactly what negative conditioning is. And because you say this is the only way to get him to change his behavior, you leave no possible room for positive reinforcement.
As far as the girl who refuses to change her behavior, that is when punishment is appropriate.
If she is offending others out of complete ignorance of doing so, she should be told she is offending others, it should be explained why, and then she can be given the opportunity to act correctly. Then rewarded for doing so. That is when positive reinforcement is the better option because it will condition her to act correctly of her own free will rather than to just escape punishment. If she doesn't act correctly after knowing the situation,
then, we agree, she deserves punishment.
This entire thread, everything I have said has been in reference to people who do not intentionally harm or offend someone, not people who willingly do so. Positive reinforcement obviously is not applicable to someone who is acting negatively with intent for that case.
So to bring it to a point:
Negative reactions and conditions should take place when someone knowingly does wrong or causes harm. Positive reinforcement should take place when someone makes a mistake and is made to understand how that mistake has caused issues, and changes his or her behavior voluntarily to avoid future harm.
My single issue is that I think you're saying that even if someone doesn't know he's causing harm, he deserves to be punished and conditioned negatively. That is how serial killers and criminals are created out of children who learn that the only way to get things they want or to get people to act how they'd like them to act is by inflicting harm. Because that's the only tool they've been given in learning how to change their own behavior. This isn't really an opinion...it's been proven time and time again.
So to bring it to a finer point and answer (again) the question posed by this thread: Yes, it matters if harm is intentional.
You keep insisting that I'm taking us down rabbit holes, but I'm only trying to address your question.
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For the perpetrator, not the victim. The victim has to deal with shame in a whole different way from the perpetrator. For the perpetrator, you either feel bad about what you did and change how you act, or you don't.
Even if the perpetrator is given zero chance to understand that he has done something others perceive as wrong? Not even necessarily wrong...just that others
perceive is wrong? Isn't
that potentially holding him accountable for someone else's subjective opinion he has no control over?
My point is that if someone knowingly does something he shouldn't, the proper approach to deal with it should be different than if someone does something that causes offense without even realizing it.
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So you state simultaneously that basic human psychology is both right and not always going to be helpful or desirable? How exactly does that work?
I'm speaking in terms of it being factually correct. If you don't like it that people who constantly face insults every day regardless of the veracity of those insults are going to have a necessarily more negative outlook on life than people who don't face those things, I'm sorry...but those are scientifically verified facts.
Whether or not it's helpful or desirable for them to have that sort of outlook or reaction is debatable, but it doesn't really change anything about how the average human mind
will respond to that sort of treatment.
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That's where this has been going. I don't attach any sense of responsibility to feelings of shame. I have stated repeatedly that feelings of responsibility can only be decided by each individual person. When I say that people who feel bad for having hurt others feel shame, that is not a statement about what they should feel. It is a statement of what they feel. If they feel bad about having done something, then they feel shame for having done that thing. Regardless of whether or not it was an accident.
Not all negative feelings are feelings of shame though. Feeling sorry for something does not necessarily denote embarrassment or humiliation over it. Shame does. You can feel bad for the outcome of something without being ashamed of it.
But let's not forget that the whole reason the concept of shame was brought into this is because you initially referred to shame being purposely inflicted upon someone for a perceived offense. Not that the person spontaneously felt bad for something they did...that they did something that offended someone else, even unwittingly, and that the offended or group of offended individuals then "decides to put another on blast for a perceived racist or sexist comment" (your words).
So that person is now potentially being held accountable for what's going on in someone else's head without purposely causing it to happen. How they
perceived an action. And the result is that the person with the perception is trying to inflict shame on the person committing the act based on his perception and nothing else.
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Let's look back to one of the first examples in this thread. If I accidentally punch someone while stretching, then I will still feel bad about having caused harm to another, even if it was an accident. I will attempt to make sure that it doesn't happen again, even if the first instance was an accident.
Now lets contrast this with a person who doesn't feel bad for punching someone accidentally. Suppose they decide that because it was an accident, they shouldn't feel bad about it. Suppose they believe that it was unavoidable. Thus they will make no effort to prevent it in the future, and consequentially it will happen again at a higher frequency than if they had taken steps to avoid it. They 'refused to learn' as it were.
You're completely glossing over the huge point I've been making this whole time that empathy can keep someone from making the mistake again. Empathy can cause someone to feel bad for causing harm to another. Empathy is not the same thing as shame, and my entire (only) reasoning for positing my experience and insisting to you that I was not ashamed of those experiences was to show that it can emerge from things that are not shame. That's all I've been saying, and it's been completely on point with what we've been talking about.
If someone I love gets hurt in a car accident that I'm not involved in at all, I'm not going to be ashamed of the car accident but I'll still feel bad that he or she has been hurt. Because I empathize with them and don't want them to be hurt. And so I learn to not cause car accidents because it will cause that pain in someone else.